MA R I A H VOLUME THREE ISSUE TWO
VOLUME THREE ISSUE NUMBER TWO
6 10 24 30 40 48 60 76 92
RE:DISCOVERY PEACHES RECORDS YUKIMI COLLEEN “COSMO” MURPHY VICTOR SIMONELLI MANNIE FRESH NIGHTMARES ON WAX CHARLIE AHEARN MARIAH CAREY
108 118 134 142 146
BORN BUSY JOE BATAAN YOSHIKO SAI VENNA SADAR BAHAR
Cover Version One (’90s Icon Edition) ( front cover ) Mariah Carey. Photo by Deborah Feingold. ( back cover ) Tupac Shakur. Photo courtesy of Gerard “GE-OLOGY” Young. Cover Version Two (Underground Edition) ( front cover ) George Evelyn of Nightmares on Wax. Photo by Ollie Trenchard. ( back cover ) Mannie Fresh. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez.
VOLUME THREE ISSUE NUMBER TWO
Contributing Photographers Charlie Ahearn
Editor Jesse Serwer Designers Standby Projects Tāne Stappard Theo D’Cruz Publisher and CCO
Contributing Writers Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha Martie Bowser Paul Cantor Ericka Blount Danois Edwin STATS Houghton Steve Krakow Sara Rosen Jesse Serwer Sope Soetan Matt Sonzala Andy Thomas Dean Van Nguyen Oliver Wang Contributing Illustrators Steve Krakow Standby Projects
Stefan Andersson Lemar Arceneaux Gregory Bojorquez Sergio Lopez Borja Vittoria Bozzarelli Martha Cooper Jane Dickson Fredrik Egerstrand Studio ELLE Deborah Feingold
David Holt Chairman Nikhil Shah CEO Alex Bruh CTO Maarten Vleugels Collections and Creative Project Officer Joshua Thomas Collections and Creative Specialist Tiffanie Ibe Intern Joy Buckley Founders
Karol Grygoruk Elliot Hensford Ellie Koepke Eilon Paz TJ Sawyerr Ollie Trenchard Vincent Villard
Andre Torres Brian DiGenti Dennis Coxen
Publisher thanks A big thank you to Jesse Serwer and Standby for all your hard work and commitment to the issue. A further shout out to those who helped bring this issue together beyond our core team: Charles and Matt at Roland; Vic Crezée at Patta; Mark and Antal at Rush Hour; Ornella at Sounds Familiar; Imani Thomas; Simone Serwer; the Wax Poetics shareholders; all our contributors; and, of course, our readers. Much love.
© 2026 Wax Poetics ISSN 2666-3104 WP Media B.V. London All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication without prior consent prohibited.
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WaxPoetics 3
TEN THOUSAND HOURS
studio game from Steve “Silk” Hurley and Ice-T, which he’d bring back home to the SeventhWard.When it came time for his moment, he was more than ready. Mannie Fresh had put in the work. Across the Atlantic in West Yorkshire, George Evelyn had also been in the trenches for years before his breakthrough with 1995’s chill-out masterpiece, Smokers Delight . In his feature “Rewind and Come Again,” writer Andy Thomas takes us on a deep dive into the origins of Evelyn’s Nightmares on Wax project, from the reggae sound system circuit in Evelyn’s native Leeds to the post-rave afterparties where he workshopped his downtempo collages for an audience of friends years before sharing them with his label. Another recurring theme in this issue is the cassette.As a Xennial, I got started buying music in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that brief moment when tapes were the dominant format. All four of our cover stars—Mariah, ’Pac, Mannie, and George/Nightmares—got going then, too, and it’s cassettes, not vinyl, that play a central role in their artistic origin stories. It was fun to revisit that time with the stories—and visuals—in this issue. This year we celebrate twenty-five years of Wax Poetics (more on that soon), and to mark the occasion we’re digging into our editorial crates to dust off some classics and catch up with old friends. Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn first appeared in Wax Poetics Issue 3, at the start of the journey in 2002. But we jumped at the chance to reconnect with Charlie as he revisited Super 8 images he shot during the Wild Style days, turning photos of people like Busy Bee and Dot-A-Rock into bold paintings that capture the vibrancy of early hip-hop and NewYork’s street scene in its gritty, grimy glory. When Oliver Wang interviewed boogaloo bad boy Joe Bataan for Issue 19’s cover story in 2006, “Subway Joe” was in the early stages of a career revival after two decades away from music.Twenty more years have passed and Bataan, now in his mid-eighties, is still on the road. In a follow-up to our original story—which we’ve reprinted in this issue, in a new format that’s all about adding fresh context to our classic stories—Wang caught back up with Bataan for a conversation on embracing the blessings of an unlikely third act. One of my favorite anecdotes in this issue comes from Brooklyn DJ/producer Victor Simonelli. Recalling late nights spent cutting tape for remixes while apprenticing at Arthur Baker’s Shakedown Sound studio in the late ’80s, Simonelli shares the story of how he woke up one night on his subway ride home,and imagined he’d been sucked into one of the facility’s tape machines. Shakedown was the ultimate networking spot for aspiring remixers and producers, and Simonelli squeezed all he could from his time there, hallucinations included. When it came time to start dropping his own records— sample-driven, soulful house bangers like “I WantYou to Know” by Groove Committee—he already had the formula. He’d found his community, and he’d put in the work.
You’re probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand hour rule. In his 2008 book, Outliers , the social theorist argues that putting in at least that many hours of dedicated practice is a prerequisite for creative genius and game-changing innovation in any given discipline. I never finished that book but the Beatles’ Hamburg years—where an early version of the Fab Four (there were five at the time, actually) found their rhythm performing six shows a day in post-war Germany—is a case study, and I won’t argue against that one. Still, when it comes to music (and most other creative disciplines, too) there’s another component that I’d venture is just as critical as well-practiced talent: community. In this issue, we’re exploring the “ten thousand hours” that preceded the professional breakthroughs of some truly iconic and influential figures—the work before the work—and the role that community played in facilitating those breakthroughs.We start with cover stars Mariah Carey and Tupac Shakur—some might say the definitive recording artists of the 1990s—and a pair of demo tapes, both coincidentally from 1988, that have recently come to light, revealing their burgeoning artistry in very formative stages. Raised by an opera-singing mom and the sounds of radio stations like WBLS, Mariah found her tribe as a teenage prodigy on the Manhattan studio scene of the late 1980s, where she gained invaluable experience shadowing folks like Gavin Christopher and Cindy Mizelle—talented artists in their own right who nevertheless scored their most consistent work behind the scenes.The 1988 demo Mariah recorded in a woodshop with musicians Ben Margulies and Chris Toland would be a gamechanger, teeing up the “overnight” success of her 1990 debut. But it was only when Brenda K. Starr, with whom Mariah toured as a backup singer, passed some copies of the tape around that things started moving Mariah’s way. Tupac’s early recordings with his high-school group Born Busy, meanwhile, didn’t start circulating until well after his death. Some still haven’t been heard. His ’88 demo wasn’t meant to solicit interest from record labels; it consists of a capella rhymes he recorded expressly for Gerard Young, the group’s DJ and producer, to craft beats around. Nearly forty years later, however, the recordings on this tape—and a series of photos and ephemera from this time shared by Young, better known today as GE-OLOGY—offer a revealing window into a moment when ’Pac was finding his voice amidst the theater freaks and hip-hop geeks at Baltimore School for the Arts. As the in-house producer for Cash Money Records, Mannie Fresh led New Orleans to the pinnacle of hip-hop in the late ’90s. But, as NOLA native Martie Bowser shares in her profile on Mannie, he was grinding at project block parties and neighborhood nightclubs for a whole fifteen years before then, marinating the sound that would later make Cash Money one of the most successful independent record labels ever. Like so many New Orleans kids, Mannie was born into a musical community: he ran the streets with his DJ dad, Sabu, and interned at Allan Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Studios. He’d also expand his horizons in Chicago and L.A., soaking up
Jesse Serwer Editor
WaxPoetics 5
BY OLIVER WANG
“Somos Asiáticos/Venceremos” is a unique musical artifact of race and resistance: a pair of Spanish-language songs, recorded by a pair of Japanese-American musician/activists, released on a Puerto Rican imprint. It’s a snapshot of New York City in the early 1970s, a heady period when various political movements converged around a pair of young artists in Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima. While both had family roots in California, the two met in Harlem in 1969, connected by the burgeoning Asian American Movement that was then uniting various groups—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino—under a new, umbrella identity. This was no small aspiration: these communities had different immigrant histories, languages, and customs. Their main commonality was surviving generations of anti-Asian racism. The Movement espoused new forms of solidarity, not only across Asian ethnic groups, but with other communities as well. Nobuko and Chris shared artistic backgrounds. Chris played French horn and guitar, and Nobuko was a professional dancer on Broadway and in movies.Together, they wanted to contribute to the sound of a young Asian America, inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan to Leadbelly to Santana. As Nobuko wrote in her 2021 memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly , she and Chris were motivated by a simple but powerful question:“Where was our music? What is a people without their own song?” The pair’s best known composition became “We Are the Children,” an ode to the parallel struggles faced by different Asian American communities. They performed the song on The Mike Douglas Show , with Yoko Ono and John Lennon watching, and recorded a version for their own Yellow Pearl label in the early 1970s. In 1973—now joined by Chinese American musician/ performer, William “Charlie” Chin—the three recorded a new version to anchor an LP for Paredon Records: A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America , widely considered the first self-consciously Asian American album. Nobuko and Chris also wrote and performed several Spanish- language songs to demonstrate their cross-community unity. The opening lines from “Somos Asiáticos” make this gesture clear: Iijima y Miyamoto “Somos Asiaticos” b/w “Venceremos” (Discos Coqui) Circa 1971
Hablamos la misma lengua porque luchamos por las mismas cosas (we speak the same language because we struggle for the same causes) La lengua de libertad (the language of liberty) Líricas de amor (the lyrics of love) A pair of Nuyorican friends in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, Flora and Pepe Sánchez—aka husband-and-wife folk duo, Pepe y Flora—offered to release “Somos Asiáticos” on their Discos Coqui imprint. According to Nobuko, “this was our first time in a real studio,” and while Iijima’s acoustic guitar and his and Nobuko’s vocals dominate the composition, the background studio players add a subtle bossa nova feel, with some uncredited funky flute to boot. For the B-side, Nobuko and Chris added their version of the Chilean protest song, “Venceremos” (“We Shall Overcome”).A later version of “Somos Asiáticos” was included on A Grain of Sand but “Venceremos” is unique to this single, which was only released in Puerto Rico. In her memoir, Nobuko wrote, “I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that they played our songs on jukeboxes around the island.” While she, Chris, and William remained friends for decades to follow, outside of the A Grain of Sand album, they never recorded as a trio again, save for Nobuko recording backing vocals for Chris and William’s 1982 duet album, Back to Back . The group began performing reunion concerts in the late 1990s, but then Chris passed away from a blood disorder in 2005, inspiring filmmaker Tad Nakamura to create a documentary short, A Song For Ourselves , in 2009 about Chris’s life and times, including interviews with Nobuko and William and vintage footage of the trio performing. Nobuko, now in her late eighties, still sings and teaches dancing, and was the focus of Nakamura’s 2024 documentary feature Nobuko Miyamoto:A Song in Movement. More than fifty years after Chris and Nobuko recorded “Somos Asiáticos” for Discos Coqui, the single remains one of the most symbolically important recordings in not just their own respective catalogs, but in Asian American history.The story of its birth, and the potency of its message, is a reminder that communities aren’t just forged from common values but also from the shared struggle for respect, recognition, and unity.
Nosotros somos asiáticos y nos gusta cantar para la gente (we are Asians who like to sing for the people)
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BY EDDIE STATS HOUGHTON
Leon Ware Rockin’ You Eternally (Elektra) 1981
meditation. It was a method that perfectly suited not only Marvin’s voice but also his persona, matching the questioning, soul-searching intensity he had cultivated since What’s Going On . Ware quickly followed this success with another solo LP. Musical Massage (1976) is a sort of deep-cut companion piece to I Want You , treasured by connoisseurs for its alternate renditions of some of that album’s source material. Its cult status also established the sort of liminal stardom that would define Ware’s career; celebrated but not a celebrity, his own spotlight always competing with the success of the material he crafted for artists with more established personas. This was a space he had occupied in L.A.’s studio world for some years already when he crossed paths with Marcos Valle. Like Ware, Valle was born into a perfect musical storm, but on the opposite end of the gulfstream, growing up across the street from bossa nova architect Antonio Carlos Jobim in Rio de Janeiro’s beachside Copacabana neighborhood.Trained in classical piano from age five and immersed in the mix of jazz and samba wafting out of the same Zona Sul cafés where Jobim composed “The Girl from Ipanema,” Valle wasted no time channeling his unique upbringing into great music, recording one of bossa nova’s most recognizable melodies (1964’s “Samba deVerão”) by the time he was in his early twenties. Young, talented, and famous, with beach-boy looks, Valle seemed to be living the most charmed of lives. But, by the early ’70s, he’d fled this South Atlantic paradise to escape Brazil’s military dictatorship. He landed in L.A., and, by decade’s end, had carved out a life as idyllic as self-imposed exile can be, motorbiking between sessions for Sarah Vaughan and tennis matches with fellow studio rats from bands like Toto and Chicago. It was Chicago’s Robert Lamm who recruited Valle to contribute words and melody to “Love Is a Simple Thing” from Leon Ware’s 1979 album Inside Is Love . The Carioca and the Detroiter clicked immediately— Valle’s ability to unpack complex musical structures around a polyrhythmic groove opening all sorts of unexpected side passages from Ware’s confessional way with a chord—and they began collaborating on work that would form the core of 1981’s Rockin’ You Eternally. A snapshot of L.A.’s soul at the dawn of the ‘80s, the album defied easy description in the moment but was the sort
Leon Ware is one of those names that can make you pick up a record out of the Soul, New Arrivals bin on the strength of a writing credit alone. Long before his exquisitely sensual compositions (Minnie Riperton’s “Inside My Love,” for example) were looped up into your favorite beats (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Lyrics To Go,” for example), “Written by L. Ware” already conveyed an aura of IYKYK cachet. Born a preacher’s kid in the perfect musical storm of post- war Detroit, young Leon sang in jazz bars with a teenage Yusef Lateef and started a doo-wop group with Lamont Dozier. Plugged into the Motown circuit from the early ‘60s, he wrote songs like “Got to Have You Back” for the Isley Brothers but made his artistic debut with a self-titled release for another label— United Artists—in 1972. Bluesy and vulnerable, driven by Ware’s fragile, gospel-tinged tenor, the album contained gems (“What’s Your World”) but didn’t generate a chart hit. Within a few years, however, his songwriting for Motown delivered a different sort of breakthrough when “I Wanna Be Where You Are”—co-written with Diana Ross’s little brother, Arthur “T-Boy” Ross—became one of Michael Jackson’s earliest solo hits. In demand as songwriters for the likes of Jackson, Riperton, and Quincy Jones (who recruited Ware to pen and sing the title track on 1974’s Body Heat , later interpolated on Mobb Deep’s “Temperature’s Rising”), Ware and T-Boy began work on songs intended for a Motown album from the younger Ross. But when Berry Gordy heard one of the tracks Ware had tossed off to round out their demo, he felt it was so right for Marvin Gaye that it might lure the reclusive singer back into the studio.That song was “I Want You,” and as Ware explained to Jason King in 2016, he soon found himself at Marvin’s home, running through his reel of unreleased material: “We listened to it three times. [Marvin] turned around, looked at me, and said,‘If you give me that album, I’ll do the whole thing.’” I Want You became not only one of Marvin Gaye’s most commercially successful releases but also one of the first albums Motown trusted to a single writer and producer. A far cry from the polished lyrics and catchy changes of the Motown formula, Ware’s approach was to find a bittersweet chord and then linger there, exploring the emotional (and erotic) possibilities within the subtlest variations of groove and texture, like a sort of tantric
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“Hey!” It’s one of those scintillating moments when a throwaway b-section suddenly becomes the heart of the song. On “In Our Garden”—the most Marvin-esque composition on the album— long instrumental passages overlaid with news chatter provide revelatory counterpoint to Ware’s plaintive sermon on the state of the world. On the title track, a striking, almost suspenseful ostinato on piano creates tension eased by atmospheric chords, opening space for Ware’s central conceit: making the sexual feel spiritual. Like so many Ware compositions, “Rockin’ You Eternally” has been heavily sampled and acquired a sort of cult status. True to Ware’s destiny as a secret sharer in others’ celebrity, however, it remains in the IYKYK category, whereas another of the pair’s compositions from this period—“Estrelar”—became a worldwide hit for Valle in 1983. For those who live in the Soul, New Arrivals bin, however, Rockin’ You remains a uniquely rewarding delight, full of those breezy sidestreet moments where Valle or Ware takes the other’s melodic conception in a joyously unexpected direction, like a movie where the hero’s story is suddenly upstaged by the performance of a brilliant character actor.
of release that kept curators busy with the creation of all sorts of invented genres—yacht rock, rare groove, boogie—long after the fact. Valle contributed melodies to “Baby Don’t Stop Me,” “Got to Be Loved,” and the title track, but, according to Valle, the partnership was so intuitive he now has trouble remembering who wrote what. “We were so comfortable writing and recording together,” he explained in a 2021 interview with writer Anton Spice.“Because I think that the roots of samba and American rhythm and blues are the same.” Certainly, Afro-Latin rhythms were at the heart of the Motown sound. While in Ware’s previous work these percussive elements tended to remain as layered, atmospheric beds for his musical sermons, on Rockin’ You Eternally , polyrhythmic grooves become almost a second voice in counterpoint to Ware’s. “Baby Don’t Stop Me” is a perfect example: Valle’s fuzzy synth vamp creates a body-music all its own before Ware takes it to another level, developing his thesis that “It’s alright to get carried away!” This intro-groove returns, about two-thirds through, as a euphoric instrumental bridge, punctuated only by Ware’s ecstatic
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Peaches Records 4318 Magazine St. New Orleans, Louisiana United States
A family-run New Orleans institution for over fifty years, Peaches Records fostered the rise of the city’s homegrown hip-hop scene.
BY MATT SONZALA PHOTOS BY LEMAR ARCENEAUX
For a city of its size, it’s wild to think how often New Orleans has transformed music and culture. Jazz was created in its winding streets and back alleys in the late 1800s, and spread throughout the world.The rhythm and blues of Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, and their contemporaries inspired sounds ranging from early rock and roll to Jamaican ska.The Meters and Allen Toussaint ushered in a new era of funky dance music in the ’60s and ’70s that crossed every border. More recently, artists from No Limit and Cash Money Records took over the late ’90s with a distinctly New Orleans style of rap rooted in the call-and-response chants of bounce music and the exuberance of second-line brass bands. For over fifty years, Peaches Records has been at the center of it all, promoting New Orleans’s homegrown genres, alongside music from around the world. The late Harris “Lee” Rea III opened the first Peaches shop in the city near the University of New Orleans in 1975, and soon brought on his wife, Shirani, to help grow the business. Lee Rea had moved to New Orleans from North Carolina in 1968 to attend Tulane University and, like many before and after him, fell in love with the city’s rich and diverse music culture. As an undergrad, he was among the students who founded Mushroom New Orleans, a Tulane area record and head shop still operating today. The Peaches name and logo came from a 1974 Capricorn Records compilation, which featured Lee’s friend, Gregg Allman, among other Southern rock notables. Although the store shared similar branding to the national (and now long-defunct) Peaches Records and Tapes chain founded in Los Angeles, Lee Rea explained in a 1980 Billboard interview that his business was a completely independent operation, dedicated to serving the tastes of the New Orleans market. “It was a source of pride for my father that Peaches was a full- service record shop,” says Harris Rea IV, Harris and Shirani’s son, who also goes by Lee.“It made sense for us, being in the most musical city in North America, to work alongside the musicians from across genres who made, and still make, our city great.”
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( opposite ) Illustration by Standby Projects, based on the Peaches logo by Ignacio Gomez.
At one point, Peaches had eight stores across the metro area but, by the late ’80s, the operation was consolidated into the Reas’ main shop at the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard and Elysian Fields Avenue—a crossroads you couldn’t miss if you were traversing Uptown NOLA.This space, with its doors wide open to the community, became the beating heart of New Orleans music, especially its burgeoning homegrown hip-hop scene. From behind the counter of Peaches’s current location on Magazine Street, also Uptown in the Garden District, the younger Lee Rea shares some wisdom from his father, who passed away in 2017:“Something my dad used to always say [was],‘If art imitates life, and you’re in such a musical city, then your local record shop should be the epicenter for local culture, period.’ People should be coming in here to find out what is going on.And that was our focus.When mom took over, she was so artist focused, and wanted to help all the local artists. Being in our location allowed mom to help foster people, and expose them to all of the city.” And foster she did. Many local rap stars refer to Miss Shirani Rea as “Mom,” and she doesn’t take that title lightly. “The artists here are like my children,” Shirani says with conviction.“They’ll tell you that.They are as close as they can be to being my biological children. Mia X, KLC, and Mannie Fresh were in the store every day.” She stops to share credit with her late husband and their kids, Lee and Lillie. “The whole family is responsible for Peaches being Peaches. It’s more of an institution than a record store. It’s a labor of love. A family taking care of families.” It’s a vibe captured in the 1993 video for “Bootin’ Up” by Da’ Sha Ra’, an early bounce music classic that put local label Take Fo’ Records on the map. “Different artists from the East Bank and West Bank would all get together there after school in the afternoons, and there was no separation between high school kids and gangsters,” Shirani says.“Everyone put their stuff down when they came in, and it was just amazing. There was a lot of love involved, just so you know. A lot of them had bad home lives so they had no other place [to go]. It was a very cultural place where everyone got a chance to do positive things, and help each other out, no matter where they came from or what kind of life they had. It was a very beautiful experience. It’s hard to explain that.” You kind of had to be there to truly understand the importance of a great, community-centric record store in the days before streaming and social media. Bars and clubs would leave flyers advertising live music. Local poster artists could showcase their work promoting a non-stop barrage of events that, in a city like New Orleans, never seemed to end.At Peaches, candlemakers, authors, and artists of all genres and experience levels had a space to sell their wares. But it was when members of the city’s rap scene started producing cassettes and CDs of their extremely local sounds that Peaches really became the place to be. MC Gregory D started out with pioneering New Orleans group Ninja Crew in the mid-’80s, and later released some of the earliest New Orleans rap albums as part of a duo with Mannie
Fresh. “Peaches was basically the heart of the Seventh Ward, and the heart of a lot of local musicians,” he remembers. “They gave breath to a lot of artists.You only had a handful of stores doing consignment, where you could drop your shit off, and come collect…the whole nine yards.” This was huge for independent artists just starting out, not knowing the ins and outs of the music business. Shirani recognized that, and helped local talents produce and release their recordings. When a young MC T. Tucker—the originator of bounce music, alongside DJ Irv—brought this new sound to Shirani’s attention, she helped him get it to the streets. An early cassette version of the duo’s single “Where Dey At?”—widely considered the first bounce track—was sold through the shop, with the label S.R. Records, for Shirani Rea, printed on the tape.“Artists didn’t know what to do, and didn’t have the money, so Mom wanted to help,” Lee explains. The help didn’t end there. Peaches would commission local artisans to paint murals across the side of their building promoting new releases by local acts—advertising them to everyone driving through one of Uptown’s busiest intersections. The first of these featured the 1989 Gregory D and Mannie Fresh album, D Rules the Nation . This meant the world to Gregory D. “Peaches was where everyone hung out. After school, you could come in and see me, see Mannie, see Master P, see Cash Money, see Mia X working there, the whole New Orleans…if you was anybody in the hip- hop field, the R&B field, the music field, you had to go through Peaches.That was the spot to be.” He reinforces how love played a real part in making Peaches more than just another record store.“Between Shirani and Lee and the staff, they made you feel like home,” he says. “They [would] treat you so good. You would hang around Peaches even if you didn’t have no business being there because they had arcade games in there. Without a store like that, I don’t know what we would have done. Peaches gave birth to a lot of major situations in New Orleans.” Before Cash Money Records had its game-changing, $30-million joint venture with Universal, a rep from the major label asked Shirani what was hot in New Orleans. She told them about Cash Money, and shared a copy of B.G.’s Chopper City (an independent 1996 Cash Money release not to be confused with 1999’s platinum-selling, Universal-distributed Chopper City in the Ghetto ), among other albums. “It was easy for her to put that package together,” Lee explains. “We were selling pallets of this stuff when they were independent.After that, we probably in 1998 to 1999 sold twenty thousand units of Juvenile’s 400 Degreez by ourselves.” Hip-hop wasn’t the only genre moving major units at Peaches. “There were no slow days in that Seventh Ward location,” Lee says. “Sundays would be full of customers in search of gospel music once they got out of church.Then, in the early afternoon, people would leave their party on the lakefront, grab a daiquiri, and come
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( opposite ) Shirani Rea and Harris “Lee” Rea IV, the mom-and-son team behind Peaches Records.
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to Peaches. It turned into this every-Sunday block party. We’d have a thousand people every Sunday in front of the store: Food vendors out front, and artists [performing] inside.” One of Peaches’s employees around this time was New Orleans legend Mobo Joe, whose label Mobo Records released albums from artists like Ruthless Juveniles, Dog House Posse, and Cheeky Blakk before he was arrested and sent to federal prison in 1998. When he got out several years later, Shirani offered him a job. “I had another job and a girlfriend that stayed right down the street so I used to hang at Peaches,” Mobo Joe recalls.“Shirani said, ‘Man, you probably should start working here.’ I would work there at night after I got off my other little job. Peaches plays a big part. She [does] a lot for the local scene. No matter what kind of music it is, she really supports the locals.” Speak to any artist who came up in this era of New Orleans music, and they will share similar stories. Mac, who got his start under the name Lil’ Mac in the early ’90s before joining Master P’s No Limit roster, is another. “Peaches was the first place that allowed me to do an in-store—this was 1990 or so—for my first record, The Lyrical Midget ,” he says.“I was about twelve or thirteen, and, from that day, I formed a relationship with Miss Shirani that lasted decades. I remember looking forward to seeing the side of the building where they’d advertise whatever artist was coming
out.You was official if you had your album painted on the side of the building! It drew a lot of hype.” Kango Slimm, one half of the long-running duo Partners- N-Crime, of Big Boy Records fame, echoes Mac’s sentiments: “Peaches meant everything to us. [In] the beginning of our career in the early-to-mid ’90s, it was one of the first stores we sold out of. There was a thing called the ‘numbers system’ there—a sheet of paper that would tell you how many albums that artist sold that week. We were always at the top, and [Big Boy’s] rival company, Cash Money, thought they were rigging the numbers for us! Mia X, who was working there at the time, had to let them know that these numbers were real, and these guys were really selling like this. We were always one of their top sellers. They didn’t just sell records, they actually pushed artists, and told you about the artists.” Times weren’t always bright and sunny. Like everybody in the region, Peaches was greatly impacted by Hurricane Katrina.While Uptown wasn’t the worst hit section of the city, the store was flooded and looted. For a minute, all seemed lost. “That was a very dark time,” Lee reflects. “Windows were busted out and most of the [inventory was missing].The sad part is [it was] stuff that the neighborhood wouldn’t have taken. Like all these rare rock-and-roll collectibles that the neighborhood just didn’t care about. So it wasn’t our customers stealing. Someone
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( top and opposite ) The current home of Peaches Records, on Magazine Street in New Orleans’s Garden District. Exclusive prints of these images are available at Waxpoetics.com.
The vibe couldn’t be more different today. At Peaches, everyone is welcome, and you will know this as soon as you step in and are greeted, most likely, by Shirani or Lee themselves. On Friday evenings, the store hosts a showcase for local musicians, rappers, and comedians on a stage in the rear of the shop. What started as a summer event for people to pre-game before going to Tipitina’s down the street has become a year-round happy hour with free beer and pizza. It’s very community minded.“Our store right now is built around that stage in the back,” Lee says. “Where is the kid from the Thirteenth Ward gonna get his first show? Talent shows aren’t what they used to be. Our mission is to bring people together. So our events are a mix of cultures and mediums. Since the store is so big, you can have this mini-festival environment.” As Lee explains, New Orleans is a relationship town. And Peaches was built on relationships. “Mom is so beloved because she just gives it all,” Lee says. “We have been out so many times, and people come up to her and cry and hold her and say they were young and broke and sad, and you gave me a hug after school. I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
came in and boxed up the entire reggae collection.” It took Peaches eighteen months to get back on their feet. With no money coming in, Shirani had to decide between rebuilding her home or opening a new shop. She sold her house and used the money to move into a former Tower Records space in the French Quarter. “We were the only mom-and-pop nationwide to go into a big-box store. Period,” Lee explains.“The Tower store had a real place in people’s hearts in New Orleans as well.We were very blessed with repeat business but it was hard for our [old] local customers to get down there.” In 2015, the Reas moved into a 15,000-square-foot former Woolworth’s department store at 4318 Magazine Street, which made Peaches one of the largest record shops in the Southern U.S., and ultimately brought them closer to the community that made the store what it is. “The community here is amazing,” Lee says of this newest location. “First of all, we are nestled between five schools. Parents come in before school gets out, bring the kids in after.We now have a whole kids section. It’s been crazy to get back into the neighborhood, and see the same guys every day. ” The building itself is teeming with history. It still has the scars of the Jim Crow era, including a luncheonette counter that was built in 1949, and totally segregated:Whites in one section, Blacks in another.
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Roland’s TR-1000 Rhythm Creator combines analog pedigree and digital innovation for a new kind of drum machine. BY PAUL CANTOR
A bout five years ago, engineers at the Japanese electronic instrument company Roland realized they had a unique conundrum. The sounds they’d created in the early 1980s, notably from the TR-808 and TR-909 Rhythm Composer drum machines, had more than stood the test of time.They were used in nearly every modern hip-hop and dance track, if not all contemporary music. But almost nobody making these songs was using the original hardware. Plug-ins and sample packs did the job instead.Young producers, raised on software like Ableton Live and FL Studio, were largely unfamiliar with Roland and its history. “When I’d pull up for an event, I’d say ‘Anyone who’s heard of the 808, put their hand up,’ and every hand would go up,” says Matthew “Recloose” Chicoine, Roland’s marketing director, and a noted DJ/producer himself. His day job involves traveling the world, evangelizing Roland’s products, and leading workshops on their machines. “Then I’d say, ‘How many people have heard of Roland?’” Not nearly as many hands would go up. It was an interesting position for Roland. Founded by engineer/inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka in 1972, Roland is legendary for its pioneering work producing analog synthesizers, effects units, and sequencers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the company helped popularize drum machines, first with the CR-78 (the 1978 machine used to make Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”), then the TR-808 in 1980 (as heard on Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” among countless hip- hop records). Finally, in 1983, came the TR-909, which the architects of Detroit techno (Derrick May, Jeff Mills) and Chicago house (Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy) used to build the bedrock of electronic dance music. Those drum machines were not initially successful, commercially speaking. Only when they landed on the secondary
market, selling for a fraction of their original cost, were they picked up en masse by hip-hop and dance creators. But Roland, undeterred, kept releasing TR series drum machines. Then, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, they shifted their attention to grooveboxes like the MC-303 and MC-505, along with the SP line of samplers—especially the SP-404—which were adopted by producers like J Dilla and Madlib, who in turn inspired countless lo-fi beatmakers to grab their first hardware sampler and start digging in the crates. Historically, the company wasn’t short on innovation or influence. Some of their products, along with those from other companies, were so revolutionary that, in the early ’80s, the Musicians’ Union in the U.K. tried to enforce a ban on electronic instruments. Still, in recent years, it seemed like something wasn’t connecting. “[The] 808, 909, 707, 727, 606, 78,” Chicoine says, rattling off a laundry list of influential Roland drum machines. “This is the vernacular of modern music. The sound you’re hearing is Roland. It’s on the radio, be it 909 snares or hi-hats, 808 bass…but not everyone understands those sounds are part of Roland’s legacy.We needed to take back our legacy.” To accomplish that, what they needed was a new product, something that married their celebrated past with present-day tech in a way that pointed towards the future. And that’s when they realized the path forward required stepping back in time. Enter the TR-1000 Rhythm Creator. Released in October 2025, the TR-1000 is Roland’s first analog drum machine in over forty years—something the company’s fans have long been clamoring for.“There was such a chorus of users, for decades, saying,‘Roland, please come back and make something true analog for us.’ People wanted the real thing,” Chicoine says.“Finally, we were able to say, ‘Yeah, this is bold, let’s do it.’ But if we’re going to do analog again, we have to do it in a way that’s futuristic and forward-thinking.”
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( opposite ) Kuniyuki Takahashi demonstrates the Roland TR-1000 Rhythm Creator at Electric Pony Studios in Los Angeles.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ROLAND
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To ensure that the TR-1000 met today’s creators where they are, Roland consulted with dozens of artists and producers between Detroit, the U.K., Berlin, Japan, and beyond before even making a prototype.Working directly off this feedback, they began building the machine. “A lot of [musical instrument] companies in general make this product for a certain individual, a certain market, but they never really talk to anybody who’s using this thing,” says Kenny Dope, one half of the legendary house music duo Masters at Work, speaking from his studio in Maryland. He recalls the first time Roland came to him with the idea for the TR-1000. “With the Roland history, [and] what was laid as a foundation—the early drum machines, early synths, and the early sounds used on so many records—we’ve gotta be able to incorporate that in one piece,” he remembers advising. “They showed me a prototype. I said, ‘I like this, I don’t like this. I love this.’ They came back like, ‘Yo, we got it to this point.’ Then I’d say, ‘It needs to sample. It needs to warp. It needs to chop.’ And Roland has had those features in other machines. It’s like one machine does one thing really good, another machine does something [else] really good, but [before it was] not combined.” Kenny emphasized to Roland that, no matter what, the machine needed to be simple.The more features added, the more complicated using the machine might become. Nothing kills creativity faster than clicking through a series of menus to get things done.“You need to be able to look at the machine and say, ‘Alright, you know what? Let me just go,’” he says. “And that’s
Conceived as both homage and evolution, the TR-1000 features sixteen analog circuits recreated from the original TR-808 and TR-909 designs, built with modern components. Crucially, it offers a digital synthesis engine as well. The 808s and 909s are virtually mapped to the analog circuits via Roland’s Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) technology, allowing for extensive manipulation. And the machine comes pre-loaded with two thousand sounds to get started with, and dozens of effects. If that wasn’t enough, FM and VA synthesis engines are also included, as is a full suite sampler for chopping, programming, and resampling your own drum loops, and a sixteen-step sequencer, which brings back the workflow of the classic TR machines through a contemporary lens. Nearly every knob or fader is assignable, offering a head-scratching number of possibilities. Designed for musicians who could easily rely on the limitless flexibility of digital production tools but purposely choose the constraints and character of tactile, analog hardware instead, it’s a throwback to a bygone era, outfitted with the tools needed for modern music production and performance. “The truth is that much of Roland’s brand equity has been created by artists that found these instruments [later on], and reinvented them,” says Chicoine. “They brought all this new energy and life, and they brought all this attention to these instruments.We developed the TR-1000 in the hopes that, much like the 808 and the 909 spawned new styles of music that we never anticipated, this too may entice creative folks to have new ideas and make new sounds.”
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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ROLAND
until they achieved something truly unique. That hands-on approach is how they still work today, opting for a full hardware setup and, aside from recording in Pro Tools or Logic, eschewing most software-based solutions. They feel the ability to touch the equipment inspires them in ways that Virtual Studio Technology (VST) instruments do not. And that’s something that attracted them to the TR-1000. “When you get to turning the TR-1000’s knobs, all of a sudden, what’s there becomes unique to how your ear hears it,” says Posatronix.“There’s a tactile, hands-on type of art to it.This is a canvas that allows your brain to be the paintbrush in a physical way, using your hands to paint with, versus VSTs.There’s a different connection and value you get from your own internal art.” Bringing that human touch back to electronic music production was precisely the intent, says Peter Brown, Roland’s product development leader on the TR-1000.“You can really just jam out and lose yourself in it,” Brown says. “And it doesn’t feel like you’re battling a computer.” Having the ability to play the machine like an instrument itself is what leads to the kind of happy accidents that made the original line of Roland drum machines so revolutionary. West Coast hip- hop pioneer Egyptian Lover remembers getting money from his mother to buy a TR-808 from Guitar Center in the early 1980s. Shortly afterward, he was on stage with the party promotion crew Uncle Jamm’s Army at the L.A. Sports Arena, playing a cover version of “Planet Rock” on the 808.
what the TR-1000 is.” In Detroit, the birthplace of techno and its myriad offshoot genres, Roland huddled with a list of notable figures including “Mad” Mike Banks and his extended Underground Resistance collective; Carl Craig; Juan Atkins; Scott Grooves; and Octave One. Tommy “Tom Tom” Hamilton and William “B.J.” Smith (a.k.a. Posatronix) of influential techno duo Aux 88 recall Roland asking them what kind of machine they’d make if they could tap any features in the world. “It was kind of like a techno Christmas for a drum machine,” says Tom Tom. The group were already devotees of Roland hardware, citing the Juno-106 synthesizer, R-70 Human Rhythm Composer drum machine, and sound modules like the S-330 and D-550 among their favorites.Two machines they had never used, however, were the 808 and 909.While these were the foundational tools of techno, by the time Aux 88 was working on their seminal 1996 LP Is It Man or Machine (Direct Beat), they were too expensive on the resale market—and, crucially, too limited in their feature set—to seek out. “If you listen to Man or Machine from back to front, you’d assume that there was an 808 or a 909 involved, but [there] wasn’t,” says Posatronix.“Which is why we kind of ended up with our own sound. We didn’t have the advantage of having a bunch of stuff when we were coming into the game.We modified everything in the drum machine that we had.” Working on the Roland R-70, the duo stacked drum sounds on top of each other, then added effects and tweaked parameters
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couldn’t really imagine that anything could stand in for my actual original Roland drum machines that I had collected over the years. Once I got [the TR-1000] in my hands, and started to understand this was more of a serious machine, I got amped.” El-P’s change of heart would have him rewarded. The TR- 1000 has joined his repertoire of trusted studio tools.“It’s officially been standing in for my 808 and 909,” he says.“That was the first test for me because I know those machines so well, and imitations have never really matched up. But, because they put the actual analog circuits in there, it’s not merely a substitute. I actually use the drums. It’s become my go-to quick drum pattern [and] demo machine. [It’s] always synced up, always dope sounding, quick, and easy to play with, and [there’s] no clicking a mouse—which for me is really liberating.” For a hip-hop beatmaker such as El-P, the sampler feature was another gamechanger. “Using your own drums and sounds but with the swing of the 808 sequencer is something I’ve wanted forever,” he says. “[It’s] the ability to easily, tactilely blend sounds of my own with the classic sounds to create new, original shit.” Roland took a gamble revisiting analog technology in a digital world. But even with a retail cost of $2700—slightly out of reach for novices—it seems to have paid off. The TR-1000 has already proven to be a hit.The initial production run sold out in two days, leaving them working feverishly to meet demand. “We know when we listen to the artists, we make better products,” says Chicoine. “Artists are key to our future and our success. They have been, they will continue to be. [But] let’s embrace them by design, and create an instrument with them, with their feedback.That’s how we wound up with the TR-1000. We got the formula right.”
“I was scared they were going to stop dancing and start fighting because it was just a drum machine—not a record,” Egyptian Lover said in an interview for Roland’s website. “But nobody stopped dancing. Actually, people started dancing even harder. I broke it down without the cowbell, without the hi-hat, then brought the cowbell back in, hi-hat, and the rimshot.Then I changed the beat, and everybody freaked out.” Following that, Egyptian Lover released a series of influential electro hip-hop records; again, he used the 808 in ways never imagined. While working on 1984’s “Egypt, Egypt,” he began plugging cords into the machine’s inputs when he noticed a “duda-duda-duda-duda” sound. The engineer told him it was coming from the machine. Only then did he learn that the 808 had an accent function that could alter the drum velocity, and that this function could be programmed to create a melody.“I put that in my song, and that was like the Egyptian Lover sound,” he told Splice, the cloud-based sample platform, in an interview. “It was created right there.” Egyptian Lover still plays an 808 at gigs around the world, which is why Roland consulted with him on the TR-1000, too. When he got his hands on it, he was blown away.“The TR-1000 is like ten 808s,” he told Roland. “You can have that thing for a year and still discover things you didn’t know. Whatever you can think of, you can do…[it’s] the future of drum machines. I can see a DJ bringing the TR-1000 to the club and have it rockin’, like I do with my 808.” El-P, famed for his work in Company Flow and Run the Jewels as well as for producing underground rap classics like Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein through his influential label Definitive Jux, has been using Roland machines since starting out in the ’90s. The 808 and 909 are favorites. Needless to say, he was skeptical of any effort to improve upon these staples of his production sound. “When [Roland] first approached me, I wasn’t too excited,” he says.“I’ve had a bias against remakes of classic gear or hybrids. Most of my experiences with stuff like that [have] been disappointing. I
For more about the Roland TR-1000 Rhythm Creator, visit Roland.com
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( opposite ) Egyptian Lover in the mix at Electric Pony Studios.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ROLAND
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BY DEAN VAN NGUYEN Yukimi, the longtime frontwoman of Little Dragon, steps out on her own, taking inspiration from Prince, De La Soul, and the frosted bliss of Swedish winter.
A solo debut titled For You ? That sounds familiar. Yukimi Nagano, the Little Dragon frontwoman now striking out on her own as the mononymous Yukimi, uses the prelude of her first album to explain that the title is a humble dedication to you, the listener.“And here we are, spinning on a planet together,” she recites in a playful tone. “All I really, really wish for is that we remember to be connected.” Still, I couldn’t help but detect the purple influence of a certain pop demigod’s debut record by the same name. “ Always a Prince influence,” Yukimi informs me. “I’m a big Prince fan. I have been my whole life, ever since I was a child. I love his songwriting. I love his voice, the dynamics, the range, the
quirkiness, the originality. For me, he was really someone who, in his own way, expressed himself and made it easier for me to express myself in my own way.” More than a fan, Yukimi is a true disciple, calling Prince a “leading star in my life.” And so when it came to naming this project, she saw a beautiful symmetry in drawing from the celestial. “I love his first album,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite albums ever. I thought it was fitting.” There are some clear differences betweenYukimi’s For You and Prince’s 1978 album. The Kid was but a nineteen-year-old pop protégé when he unveiled his exhilarating mojo to the world, an alien talent but far from the finished product.Yukimi, in contrast,
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( opening spread ) Still from Yukimi’s “Break Me Down” video (2024), directed by Fredrik Egerstrand.
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